Hello to all that read this. My name is Megan, sometimes Szami, and I am here only in sheer desperation. Before I get into that, let me first tell you about myself. I am a 30-year-old college student who has been rejected for rehire at my former occupation. While I have received an offer to work at a small historical museum, the job does not start for a while yet and they can only offer me part time. I am majoring in Sociology with a minor in Nonprofit Administration, or at least I will when I graduate from Portland Community College and transfer to the University of Oregon (Go Ducks). I plan to take this education and work for a nonprofit that assists underserved communities. I'm inspired to do this work because I grew up with a single mom and spent time in foster care. I've been exposed to some of the more difficult circumstances in life and want to give back someday.

I live in a 2-bedroom apartment with my husband and 2 cats. We're hoping to downsize soon, but that's not what we're fundraising for! Now that you know a bit about me, let's get into why you're here reading this fundraising profile.

My husband and I had two cats going into this year, Kyo at 9.5 years old (my Emotional Support Animal), and Mews at 5.5 years old. Kyo had suddenly stopped eating in mid-January and he kept hiding in the closet. This was very unlike my food-motivated orange boy. I promptly took him to the vet like any good pet parent would, and the doctors diagnosed him with acute kidney failure. I had apparently missed all his early signs and caught it right when doctors said that treatment wouldn't be effective. Using student loan payments I had just received, we elected to have him put down, for a total of $1,165!

Two weeks went by with me, my husband, and our remaining cat Mews all grieving intensely. After two weeks of this, I had had enough. I thought that a new kitten in the family might reenergize the home and help us through our healing process. We had just enough spare income to adopt a three-month-old orange boy from the Oregon Humane Society. He came home with us sporting an Upper Respiratory Infection. The shelter was aware of this and sent him home with us with a week of antibiotics.

Not a week later, Mews, my darling little fluff monster, has blood all over his nose. After 2 days of watching his health decline and him refuse food and pets, I rush him to the Vet ER. He has an ulcer on his nose, and we're out an extra $370. We figured that would be that and we would just be late on a couple of bills this month. Three more days go by, and Mews and the new kitten are both coughing and sneezing. This is concerning when Mews is already sick and our kitten, named Tanpopo (Japanese for Dandelion), has finished his antibiotics already.

We took them to the vet today, and Mews caught the kitten's cold, has developed a new ulcer on his tongue, and Tanpopo has somehow developed an ear infection. We see the bill for discovering all this and negotiate with the vet. We manage to get the bill lowered to $956 from the original $1,385, and the vet's office has a small fund available for cases like ours. The rest was paid by my husband's entire paycheck (he's disabled but works part-time as a night janitor).

We get home to a letter on our door. In all the cat expenses and drama, we haven't been able to make a payment on our rent, thinking that we'd cover it with the next paycheck that comes in or with the income tax return. Well now we only have until March 26th to pay our rent, amongst other bills that piled up.

On top of everything else, my car chose this time to stop running. It's going to cost $1,000 to fix.

Is it normal for other expenses to take a backseat when small lives need caring for? I hope it is and I'm not just deranged for prioritizing their lives.

We plan to use this money to catch up on utilities and our outstanding rent balance. If there's any leftover after that, we'll put it toward my monthly car payments, but I am okay if we lose the car because of this.

Anyway, yeah. That's the situation we're in. I hope you can help us. Thanks in advance and feel free to reach out if you want pics of our sweet boys, both living and dead. I have so many pics of Kyo.